This is what happens during breaking news. Reporters get different pieces of information and report it through their different channels. But as we’re learning over and over, half of them, if not more, are usually wrong.

Set aside the severity of the events in Boston. All those reporters’ channels, with good information and bad, feed to Twitter now. Should it care?

Naturally, if these reports of an arrest turn out to be wrong, most of the egg will be on the face of the outlets that reported it as fact. And those that were careful and reported what they knew will get a nice little boost in the eyes of the public. But the bottom line is that most users know that the next time there’s breaking news, the roster of outlets that get the facts correct and those that make their own, will look a little different.

Twitter is not responsible for making sure anyone has the facts straight. But CNN, MSNBC and all the rest are a part of Twitter’s product — as we all are when we tweet information and run our eyeballs across advertisements — and form the links in a user-generated chain. Yes, users will unfollow the bad ones. But Twitter is known as the place to monitor breaking news and usually many of the sources feeding into it are wrong, what’s the point? If CNN is wrong this time, and they’re right the next time, and wrong the next time, and so on — why should we tune in to Twitter at all?

There is an interest in Twitter’s part on assigning credibility to feeds. Follower counts are a way for people to feel popular but they ultimately don’t tell you much about how often someone has the truth (The New York Post has over 420,000 followers).

Rumors have bubbled up here and there that Twitter is thinking about new metrics for how to rate users. For one, there is motivation to keep social media managers engaged (How’s our Tweetklout score?!) with shiny new metrics. But there is a real motivation under the hood to keep credibility with the product.

Granted, the news cycles that have this kind of breaking news — Sandy Hook, the Chris Dorner chase, etc — are actually few and far between. Most people spend their time on Twitter perusing headlines, cool blogs and chatting with friends and the benign distortions of reality on Twitter are snuffed out pretty quickly. When hard facts are at hand, Twitter’s auto-immune response is pretty thorough.

But maybe next time we need to be glued to the computer because of fast breaking events, we’ll close the browser, wait for the facts to surface — and read about it on a long story posted to Facebook.